MS Windows note: At the moment, telekasten is unlikely to be able to run on Windows, because it relies on a bash script. Just sayin. Since telekasten is a project that scratches my own itch, I am not sure if I will add Windows support any time soon. Should anyone read this: Pull requests are welcome 😄! Replacing the daily finder by a proper lua version should do the trick.

1. Install the plugin

Install with your plugin manager of choice. Mine is Vundle.

Plugin 'renerocksai/telekasten'

2. Configure telekasten

Somewhere in your vim config, put a snippet like this:

lua << END
require('telekasten').setup({
     home         = vim.fn.expand("~/zettelkasten"),
     dailies      = vim.fn.expand("~/zettelkasten/daily"),
     extension    = ".md",
     daily_finder = "daily_finder.sh",
     
     -- where to install the daily_finder, 
     -- (must be a dir in your PATH)
     my_bin       = vim.fn.expand('~/bin'),   

     -- download tool for daily_finder installation: curl or wget
     downloader = 'curl',
     -- downloader = 'wget',  -- wget is supported, too
})
END

3. Install the daily finder

Before using telekasten, a shell script needs to be installed. It finds and sorts notes the way we want. As long as I don't have a lua version for this functionality (this is literally the first time I use lua), we will have to stick with daily_finder.sh.

Luckily, the plugin can install the daily finder for you, directly from GitHub:

:lua require('telekasten').install_daily_finder()

This will download the daily finder into the bin/ folder of your home directory - or the directory you specified as my_bin in the step above.

Use it

The plugin defines the following functions.

find_notes() : find notes by file name (title), via Telescope
find_daily_notes() : find daily notes by date (file names, sorted, most recent first), via Telescope
search_notes(): live grep for word under cursor in all notes (search in notes), via Telescope
insert_link() : select a note by name, via Telescope, and place a [[link]] at the current cursor position
follow_link(): take word under cursor and open a Telescope file finder with it: selects note to open (incl. preview)
install_daily_finder() : installs the daily finder tool used by the plugin
setup(opts): used for configuring paths, file extension, etc.

To use one of the functions above, just run them with the :lua ... command.

:lua require("telekasten").find_daily_notes()

Bind it

Usually, you would set up some key bindings, though:

nnoremap <leader>zf :lua require('telekasten').find_notes()<CR>
nnoremap <leader>zd :lua require('telekasten').find_daily_notes()<CR>
nnoremap <leader>zg :lua require('telekasten').search_notes()<CR>
nnoremap <leader>zz :lua require('telekasten').follow_link()<CR>

" note: we define [[ in **insert mode** to call insert link
inoremap [[ <ESC>:lua require('telekasten').insert_link()<CR>